Lindzen spoke at Heartland Institute’s International Climate Change  Conference in July. “They all . . . could recognize that what was called climate science bore little relation to actual science.”

By Jane Shaw Stroup

For the past 30 years, ever since global warming became a public issue, Richard Lindzen, emeritus professor of meteorology at MIT, has questioned the apocalyptic view of climate change. As the topic rose to public attention in the late 1980s, Lindzen was so prominent that his views could not be ignored. Richard Kerr wrote in Science magazine in 1989 that “no other U.S. skeptic has such scientific stature.”

But over time, Lindzen became a target of hostility from advocates of global warming extremism. More disturbing perhaps were sometimes subtle attacks by his colleagues, including editors of peer-reviewed journals. For example, as he recounted in 2008,[1] the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published a paper, written with colleagues, that found a strong cooling effect from clouds. But the Bulletin then published a paper disputing this cooling effect without giving Lindzen and his coauthors the opportunity to respond in the same issue (the normal practice). And American Scientist, the journal of the scientific honor society Sigma Xi, refused to publish an article by Lindzen unless he found as a coauthor someone who differed with him on global warming!

On July 25, Lindzen spoke at the International Conference on Climate Change sponsored by Heartland Institute in Washington, D.C. His talk aimed at showing that a significant number of well-known scientists were skeptical about extreme harms from global warming during the past 30 years. His goal was to bring them out of the shadows. Most of the 21 scientists on his list are dead.

On his list were people like William Nierenberg, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and became director of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, the premier such institute in this country, and Robert Jastrow, professor of geophysics at Columbia University, founding director of the Goddard Institute and the first chairman of NASA’s Lunar Exploration Committee.

There were also Reid Bryson, founder of the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin; Joanne Simpson, president of the American Meteorological  Society and NASA’s lead weather researcher; Robert White, NOAA’s first administrator; Fred Singer (still alive and writing at age 94), who established the National Weather Service’s Satellite Service Center and is viewed as the first predictor of the earth’s radiation belts; Ivar Giaevar, who received a Nobel prize for his work in superconducting; and 14 others.

These were leading figures in science, said Lindzen. “They all . . . could recognize that what was called climate science bore little relation to actual science and that there was nothing to suggest the alarm being raised,“ said Lindzen. “Nobody was suggesting that there was no greenhouse effect or that climate doesn’t change. . . . They were simply noting the obvious—that there was nothing unusual in what we were seeing in climate, including extreme events.”

“I’m still puzzling over how it happened that there are so many people who questioned this [hysteria] yet it made no impact on the field,” said Lindzen. One reason was that “they were very often quite private in their questioning.” For example, Joanne Simpson did not speak out until she had retired from NASA. But, he mused, “somehow the rest of us didn’t make a effort at contacting these people. There was very little coordination.”

Lindzen gave credit to Heartland for bringing many skeptics together but seemed to be saying that members of the scientific community did not do what they might have done. The campaign for climate alarm was “highly organized, planned, thought out, funded, and the opposition was completely fragmented.”

[1] Richard S. Lindzen, “Climate Science: Is It Currently Designed to Answer Questions?” Paper given before Euresis (Associazone per la promozione e la diffusione della cultura e del lavoro scientifico) and the Templeton Foundation, Creativity and Creative Inspiration in Mathematics, Science, and Engineering: Developing a Vision for the Future, San Marino, August 29-31, 2008. Updated September 21, 2012.

The EPA used outdated and controversial methods to justify its expansion of federal regulation of streams, rivers, and lakes, writes R. David Simpson in a new PERC policy paper.

 

By Jane Shaw Stroup

In a new PERC policy paper, R. David Simpson reports on his experience reviewing the cost-benefit analysis of an Obama-era regulation defining “WOTUS.” (In Washington lingo, that is “waters of the United States.”)

Simpson, an economist formerly with the Environmental Protection Agency, expresses regret that he did not press harder to improve the EPA’s cost-benefit analysis of the rule, issued in 2015. The rule was designed to extend the federal government’s jurisdiction over U.S. waters under the Clean Water Act, bringing relatively isolated streams and wetlands under government regulation.

The rule went into effect, but was stayed by a federal court, then reinstated in 26 states. The Trump administration opposes it, although its future is uncertain.

What went wrong? First, the analysis “relied on dated estimates employing controversial methods that are not accepted by all economists,” says Simpson. Second, “it transferred figures from the contexts for which they were originally derived to waters that would have become jurisdictional under the 2015 rule using poorly explained and apparently ad hoc procedures.”

It also raised constitutional questions: “There seems to be a sort of paradox in supposing that waters characterized by their isolation and tenuous connections to other bodies should be subject to federal regulation.” The Constitution authorizes the federal government to regulate only interstate or international activities, he adds.

The analysis was also based on benefits determined by “willing to pay” surveys. Asks Simpson: “Why should landowners be compelled to undertake costly action for which others say they would be willing to pay, but for which the purported beneficiaries are not actually required to pay?”

Simpson suggests that economic research “could be more effective in motivating voluntary agreements to protect waters than in trying to justify compulsory restrictions imposed without compensation.”

In sum, there’s a better route to liberty, ecology, and prosperity.

For a history of the “WOTUS” debates, and a recommendation for the Trump administration, see Jonathan Adler in Cato’s Regulation magazine:

The Trump administration’s effort to narrow and focus federal regulatory efforts under the CWA is among the most significant, and potentially the most beneficial, of the administration’s efforts to reform environmental regulation.

Does the world face the extinction of 1 million species due to human activity? A UN Report says so.

Is There an Extinction Crisis?

An intergovernmental group sponsored by the United Nations recently announced that the world is facing the extinction of 1 million species, all because of human activity. “Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history — and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating,” said its news release.

Scary stuff. But is it true? The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) keeps a record of actual extinctions and in 2008 reported that over 500 years there have been 800 known extinctions. Furthermore, the extinctions peaked in the nineteenth century and have been declining since. See also, Gregory Wrightstone.

Here’s  Matt Ridley’s take:

Species extinction rates of mammals and birds peaked in the 19th century (mostly because of ships taking rats to islands). The last extinction of a breeding bird species in Europe was the Great Auk, in 1844. Thousands of years ago, stone-age hunter-gatherers caused megafaunal mass extinctions on North and South America, Australia, New Zealand and Madagascar with no help from modern technology or capitalism.

That’s not to say extinctions don’t still happen but by far the biggest cause is still invasive alien species, especially on islands: it’s chytrid fungi that have killed off many frogs and toads, avian malaria that has killed off many of Hawaii’s honeycreepers, and so on.

And Ron Bailey reminds us that the UN report follows a long line of apocalyptic extinction predictions:

S. Dillon Ripley of the Smithsonian Institution predicted in 1970 that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals would be extinct. That is, between 75 and 80 percent of all species of animals alive in 1970 would be extinct by 1995.

In 1979, Oxford University biologist Norman Myers stated in his book The Sinking Ark that 40,000 species per year were going extinct and that a million species would be gone by the year 2000. Myers suggested that the world could “lose one-quarter of all species by the year 2000.”

Bailey includes additional failed predictions by Thomas Lovejoy and Al Gore.